1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the lifting of invalid patients, which term includes infirm and disabled persons generally. It is particularly concerned with raising such patients from a sitting to a generally standing position, especially but not exclusively as part of a toileting procedure, and with hoists adapted for so raising patients.
Putting to the toilet of an elderly or infirm patient involves two difficult and dangerous lifting tasks usually performed by a team of three nurses; two of the latter co-operate in lifting the patient and the third removes necessary clothing, particularly trousers and underclothing, cleans the patient after toileting and replaces the clothing. Typically such a patient requires toileting on a commode or WC five (or more) times a day, every day, involving at least ten lifts. Not only is this expensive in terms of nursing time but, as a consequence of undertaking this task, many thousands of nurses in the UK alone suffer serious and permanent back injury.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Even though mechanical aids have been available for some years to assist in the toileting task they have not been widely accepted and the task is normally still performed manually as described above. The lack of acceptance of the aids available stems from a number of disadvantages. A first disadvantage is that most such aids are excessively complex to operate, so that busy nurses will not take the trouble to use them. A second disadvantage is that most aids do little or nothing to solve the problem of holding up a patient in such manner that the nurse can readily deal with clothing removal and cleaning of the patient; in fact such aids assume that the patient will not be wearing underclothing. A further disadvantage is that in addition to obstructing clothing removal the hoist aids which have been used or proposed in general tend to be uncomfortable for the patient if suitably held in the raised position for the requisite length of time.
In the customary manual performance of the toileting task, the patient is lifted from the sitting position on a chair by two nurses who stand facing the patient one on either side. Each of these nurses uses an arm placed around the back of the patient and under the adjacent arm of the latter to effect the lift. Once lifted and held in the standing position the third nurse involved removes the chair on which the patient was sitting, removes trousers if worn and lowers the patient's underclothing and wheels in a second chair which may be a commode chair or wheelchair. If a wheelchair the latter is used to transport the patient to a WC where the lift is repeated, both before and after toileting and then again back to an easy chair. Thus the complete procedure may involve not two but a total of four lifts per toileting cycle.